by Cesar Aira
So what happened five or six years ago is that I began, in a typically defensive way, to distance myself from the old habits of my youth. I began to shift the focus of my attention to a totalizing project for which my literary works would serve as preparatory steps, advertisements and teasers. I came to think of my little novels, which I went on writing — partly out of habit and partly to perfect my alibi — as marginal documentation, and the process of writing them as a means of understanding my life. The life of the author of the Encyclopedia.
Because that is the key name for this grand project: the Encyclopedia. And that’s what it is, too: a kind of general compendium, containing everything. The aim of a whole life is to acquire the whole of knowledge. The final record of that quest is the Encyclopedia.
I have a big folder full of preliminary notes, on which I work intermittently. It’s clear from the totalizing premises that this is one of those infinite projects whose completion date is irrelevant because it can’t actually be completed. Which is ideal for me. It allows me to rest. I have spent my life rushing to finish tasks, so as to be able to die in peace; but the Encyclopedia incorporates my death as a “glorious failure,” so I can go on writing as I please without having to worry at all.
The first novelty of my Encyclopedia is that it will be the work of a single person. The second is that it will not be limited to the general but venture into the particular. All encyclopedias do this, in as much as they include historical facts; mine will also treat the general as so many particular cases, because a generality is always a construction, so it too is a historical fact, anchored in a time and a place. The third novelty is a complicated game of equivalences, ensuring that each cultural-historical complex includes all the others, in varying forms but always reconstructing the same system of functions. Thus each particularity can subsist without the support of generalization. But enough. I’m in no rush to explain myself here, because it’s all in that big file of notes. I’m not going to end up having to scribble “I’ve run out of time” in the margin; I made sure of that from the start.
What I have in the file, of course, are sketches, plans and programs, the theory of the Encyclopedia; I haven’t written a single page of the text itself. By this stage, I wouldn’t know where to begin. The further I advance in the epistemological prolegomena, the further I leave the actual beginning behind. The genre of “preparatory notes” has its own aesthetic, its own kind of finish, and I’m becoming more susceptible to its charms as I reread Mallarmé’s notes for Le Livre and Duchamp’s for The Large Glass and the notes that Novalis made for his encyclopedia . . . Given the premises of my project, the only particular case that I could begin to write about is my own. I am the point at which the particular is particularized and the historical historicized. The sum of knowledge reverts to the individual, in his role as author of the Encyclopedia.
This question of particularities is really very literary. In a novel or a poem, it’s not a matter of clothing particulars in generality (not even Lukacs with his theory of “types” was claiming that) but of making particularity absolute, so that the absolute stands in for the general. There is something impossible or insoluble here, and in order to set it out in black and white new forms must be sought. Those forms are what I’ve been searching for more or less inadvertently in my little novels, and if I think about it like that I don’t feel so depressed about them. Let me see if I can explain myself: it’s not a matter of using scientific laws to illuminate the figure of Napoleon; it’s more like that old joke about the museum guide who shows some visitors a skull in a glass case: “This is the skull of Napoleon,” and then when they get to another glass case in which there is a tiny skull: “And this is the skull of Napoleon when he was a child.” It’s a weary old joke, I know, but it must have been fresh once. Definitions of the joke always imply some kind of formal invention, which is new by its very nature. Everything new becomes old, that’s an inescapable law. But the whole point here is to overcome laws that are universally valid. The new is preserved within the old, like the skull of the boy Napoleon inside the skull of the adult. This little joke, a modest mini-artwork accessible to everyone, conserves its cheerful novelty in spite of the tiresome repetitions, as something conceivable. It is also conceivable that every particular thing in the universe could be the object of a formal invention: iridescent, surprising, funny, unpredictable, like a butterfly with strange wing patterns flittering through a garden. In that sense my encyclopedia will be a recreative work.
All this is well and good for someone who has eternities of free time (especially in the afternoons) to spend sitting in cafés, playing the philosopher, pursuing daydreams that began in reading, and filling notebooks with futile jottings on this and that. Pastime, self-deception and excuse, in equal parts. An excuse, because it allows me to justify my unjustifiable novels as provisional approximations to a Great Work to come, to be realized on the far side of time. But like everyone else, I do occasionally have moments of candid self-appraisal. Involuntarily, but it happens, as with that wretched gaffe about the moon.
All right, then: I know nothing. Worse: I don’t know anything. “All I know is I don’t know it all.” And I don’t even have that knowledge in the form of a conviction; it’s something I have to stumble over by accident. I’d rather not lapse into psychology, but even without the help of that discipline it’s clear there’s a hole in the much-touted totality. There’s a hole in me, and in that little white darkness, I discover the real heart of the mystery, which is also my Rosetta Stone. If I could translate what I don’t know into what I know, I would be able to understand the purpose of my life. As things are, it all seems an illusion, a simulacrum made of words. And even if I understood, the scandal of my ignorance would remain intact. I lean over this bottomless well, Narcissus reborn, and an unfamiliar sadness overcomes me. I think this is the first time I have felt like a part of humanity, just when I finally have a reason to feel different.
A particular fact should never be an “example” of something general. Everyone accepts that “examples” serve as a natural hinge between the particular and the general. They proliferate in everyday speech, obviating the need for concepts, which are taken for granted. We’re always using examples in explanations; it’s almost inevitable, and we end up thinking that every particular is an example of something else, the thing we need to know about. In fact, “example” and “particular case” function as synonyms. The example, which was originally a rhetorical device, for use in persuasion, has become a way of conceiving the world, and this, in my opinion, diminishes the realness of reality. My Encyclopedia, if I were to write it, would be the central battlefield in a war against the aberrant logic of the example.
For all its merits, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is invalidated, I believe, by a blind acceptance of the exemplary function. The same applies to the work of almost all linguists; in fact, it’s hard even to imagine a book on any aspect of language that would address the thing itself, rather than examples of it. That’s why I prefer philology.
I began this book with something like an example: my ignorance about the phases of the moon and the alarm bell that it set off in my mind. As if to confirm the saying “Fear is a bad counselor,” the alarm made this episode exemplary, interchangeable with any one of the many gaps in my knowledge, and then gave way to fatalism: it would be impossible to enumerate all my lacks, and yet by mentioning just one I could give an adequate idea of their general nature, and save ink. But I like to think that this anecdote is, in fact, the example of an example, which brings us full circle, to the thing itself, exemplifying nothing, pure historical reality: my life seen from the brink of death.
IX
Here’s a story that I find thought-provoking: the death of Évariste Galois, at the age of twenty, in 1832. One night, in a tavern, some loudmouths, who may have been put up to it, provoked him into an argument over a woman, which he was obliged to settle in a duel, t
o be fought the following day, at dawn. He went to his room and spent the intervening hours writing feverishly, in order to leave a record of his revolutionary mathematical discoveries. At first light he presented himself on the field of honor and was killed. His work had been written in one night, and it is work of great importance, fundamental to modern mathematics. It’s a sad story, but in a way it has a happy ending, because he was able to leave a testimony of his genius, so he didn’t live in vain. He was able to do this in a few hours and in the space of a few pages. A novelist, in the same circumstances, would have been doomed to failure. Galois could do it because he was a mathematician: mathematical notation made it possible. That was the key to his success, I think. I have wasted many years, all the years of my youth, searching for a system of literary notation; in other words, I have spent the time granted by my futile survival imagining the instant of my untimely death.
I was searching for a system that would allow me to write all my novels on the last night. For Galois, the equivalent of this fantasy would have been to spend those nocturnal hours coming up with an infallible method for shooting accurately and surviving the duel. I think that’s what I would have done in his place, since there can be no doubt that, in his place, I would have been a genius, so the attempt would not have been absurd. He was more sensible; he was a genius, but only in the domain of mathematics; trying to extend or extrapolate from that domain was a waste of time. But it’s what I would have done, because I have entrusted my destiny to just that sort of maneuver: extensions and extrapolations, sometimes of the most fantastic kind. That’s what literature is, as I understand it: extending and extrapolating meanings into the domain of the real. Galois’s impeccable common sense told him that mathematics was one thing and reality quite another, and he stuck to mathematics.
Perhaps he had learned from his experience, which, although brief, had abounded in disasters. The tragic story of his father must have left its mark on him. Nicolas Gabriel Galois was a typical product of the Enlightenment. A Voltairean, an Encyclopedist and staunchly anticlerical, he was a fervent supporter of the Revolution and a faithful follower of Napoleon. During the last years of the Empire, he was the mayor of Bourg-la-Reine, the town near Paris where his son was born. A courteous and witty man with typically old-fashioned manners, he was well liked by the people of the town. His most notable skill was in versification: he could and habitually did come up with the most ingenious and charming rhymes about local events and characters. It is tempting to think that this rather frivolous talent was the core of the genetic heritage that he transmitted to his son; rhymes are linguistic equations, and we should not forget that it was in the field of algebraic equations that Évariste made one his most important discoveries. Versification, however, led to the downfall of his father. It is no secret that priests are unforgiving; they are also relentless and determined. A cunning village priest wrote a poem in the style of Nicolas Galois, full of obscene calumnies (or truths — it makes no difference) about the family of a prominent community member and circulated it under the name of the amiable poet. Now Galois senior should have foreseen an attack from that quarter, given the perfidy of the church, and should have been well equipped to resist, thanks to his philosophical education, but he fell apart, no doubt because the blow had found his weakest spot. This trick robbed him of the reason that he so revered. Rather than loss of face, the root cause of the breakdown must have been the theft of his style, which is everything in poetry. The mere idea that his harmless eccentricity might be misattributed was more than he could bear. He developed a virulent paranoia and killed himself soon after.
For his son, who was seventeen at the time, this tragedy was the confirmation of a kind of objective paranoia which expanded in concentric circles only to contract again. Even at that age, he had opened up whole new fields in mathematics, in spite of which he went on receiving low marks in a mediocre Catholic school. He had already failed the entrance examination for the École Polytechnique and would later be rejected again. These two failures have intrigued historians. The École Polytechnique was one of the finest in Europe at the time and its teaching staff were well trained and up-to-date in their knowledge, capable of recognizing scientific talent at first sight. Nor were there political or religious prejudices that might have intervened, because the establishment was a liberal and even subversive stronghold. How could they have failed the greatest living mathematician in an entrance exam, not once but twice? A plausible enough explanation combines factors of various kinds. In the first place, as a general rule, professors marking an exam take it for granted that they know more than the students: when the opposite occurs, the result is a dialogue of the deaf, even if there’s no ill will. There was also a more particular reason: the young genius had acquired the habit of executing all the intermediate steps in his head and thus arriving abruptly at the results. At a certain level in mathematics, results matter far less than how they were produced, and it is performance at that level, precisely, that entrance examinations are designed to test. To make things worse, the examinations were oral.
Galois tried to make his discoveries public on three occasions. In 1829, a first memoir was submitted to the most renowned French mathematician of the day, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, who promised to present it to the Academy, but forgot to, didn’t read the document and then lost it. The second and more important memoir, written as an entry for the Academy of Science’s Grand Prize in Mathematics, was in fact presented; one of the judges took it home, but promptly died, and the manuscript disappeared among the rest of his papers. The third memoir, on the numerical resolution of equations, was presented to the Academy in 1831 and read, finally, by a prestigious mathematician, S. D. Poisson, who rejected it with the bald verdict: “Incomprehensible.” Here the blame seems to lie with the elliptical style that had been the cause of Galois’s failure in the oral exams, this time in writing. Joseph Liouville, the editor of his posthumous manuscripts, published in the Journal des Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées in 1846, attributes his “obscurity” to “an excessive desire for concision.”
In any case, renouncing scientific glory, Galois threw himself into the political struggle, which he took to be the most effective means of destroying everything as soon as possible. There was no more ardent republican, no one more revolted by the Bourbon restoration, the divine right of kings and the power of the church. A pair of incendiary letters to a newspaper in the turbulent days of the 1830 revolution earned him a reputation as an extremist. At a republican banquet on the ninth of May 1831, he surprised his fellow diners with a toast to the king: “To Louis-Philippe . . .” But looking more closely, they saw that he was holding an open jackknife, its glinting blade intended for the monarch’s throat. As bad luck would have it, just at that moment, Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers and eminent informer, was passing the restaurant and witnessed this scene through the window. As a result, the police came looking for Galois and charged him with incitation to regicide. The lawyer hired by his friends had the good idea of arguing that the jackknife had been open in the diner’s hand for the simple reason that he had been using it to cut the meat, a perfectly reasonable thing to be doing in a restaurant. The jury, moved to pity by the defendant’s youth, made use of this accommodating fiction to acquit him.
But the police had no time for fictions; a few days later they arrested him again and accused him of illegally wearing a uniform (Galois had, in effect, although perhaps for want of other clothing, worn a part of the uniform of the Artillery Corps, into which he had been temporarily enlisted and which had since been disbanded by royal decree). This time he was held for six months without trial and released on bail only because cholera broke out in the prison, which had to be evacuated. A few weeks later, on the 29th of May 1832, the incident in the tavern occurred.
So that night, between the 29th and the 30th of May, he wrote it all down. As well as the famous pages in which his mathematical discoveries were recorded, wi
th the heartrending sentence — “I don’t have time” — repeated between paragraphs, he wrote some letters and a political manifesto, which he entitled, “Letter to All Republicans.” It isn’t reproduced in the biographies, so I haven’t read it, which is maybe just as well, because I don’t see how a snotty-nosed twenty-year-old can know anything about politics.
It was a duel with pistols, at twenty-five paces. His opponents and the seconds went off and left him lying wounded (maybe they thought he was dead), and there he remained for several hours until somebody saw him. He was taken to a hospital, where he died the following day. In the meantime, he was identified and the family were informed. A younger brother went to see him, in tears. Galois said: “Don’t cry. I need all my courage to die at the age of twenty.”
What would it be like to be twenty? If I make an effort, I can imagine the vigor and the freshness, the beauty and the buoyancy of that age. But I see it as something remote, a mental construction, almost unreal. Something that happened two hundred years ago, in another world, and yet at the same time curiously close and intimate. A personal fantasy. I try to make it real by extrapolating from the young people I see in the street, but it’s not the same.
I find it easier to think about it indirectly, via the film that could be made about the life of Évariste Galois. I’m surprised that it hasn’t been made already, unless it has and I’ve missed it (or maybe someone has written one of those aberrations known as “fictionalized biographies,” which work in the same way). They would have to use his last night as the frame narrative, and the bulk of the story would unfold in a series of flashbacks. It’s a trite and weary device, but in this case it would have a deep meaning, because it would thematize the mechanism of condensation and expansion that ruled Galois’s life and work. Like mathematical formulae, accidents (and bad luck in general) are atomic concentrations of experience, projected onto the screen of time.
